KBBF’s Disaster Response

English:

In the early morning hours of Monday October 9, 2017, a firestorm roared out of the hills east of Santa Rosa and swept through neighborhoods in the north of the city. The Tubbs fire, along with several other wildfires that started in the north San Francisco bay area on the same day, would soon become the worst natural disaster in California history. As of this writing, more than 8,400 structures have burned, 245,000 acres of land were consumed, 42 people died, and at the peak there were over 11,000 firefighters from all over the country fighting the fires.

By 4:00 Monday morning, KBBF President Alicia Sanchez and Program Director Edgar Avila were on the phone planning KBBF’s response. They decided to start by re-broadcasting the Internet stream of KSRO, Santa Rosa’s English-language news-talk station, which was already covering the disaster. The KBBF morning DJ, Francisco Pardo, arrived early for his 6 am show and another programmer, Ventura Longoria (AKA Mr. Chuch), also came in to provide disaster information in Spanish translated from KSRO and other sources. Hugo Mata also arrived early for his 9 am show. Due to his work with the County of Sonoma, he has a lot of resources and his strong translating ability allowed him to give very important information for a few more hours while Francisco backed him up and took phone calls.

By the afternoon many other KBBF volunteers and programmers were coming in to help any way they could. Edgar was controlling the studio via remote control software and coordinating volunteers throughout the day. Starting at 6 am on Tuesday, normal programming was pre-empted and KBBF programmers were on the air nonstop every day from 6 am to 11 pm informing the public about the disaster in Spanish. Volunteers in the office gathered information and handled the phones. On some of the days this went on until 1 am before reverting to syndication for the rest of the night. We continued in this mode for almost two weeks.

We interviewed CALFIRE officials, county supervisors, city council members, the Mexican consulate, FEMA, PG&E, the Red Cross, and many other organizations and public officials. We attended the daily joint press conferences provided by state and local agencies and translated the information into Spanish until they started repeating the press conferences in Spanish, which we then live-streamed.

We aired calls from hundreds of community members asking questions, giving information, relating their experiences, and thanking KBBF for our work. Everywhere we go in the community we hear that KBBF was the only source of information about the fires in Spanish.

The KBBF offices also became a distribution point for donations for the fire victims. Many organizations and individuals donated diapers, toilet paper, toiletries, clothing, toys, protective masks, pre-paid cellular telephones, and many other items needed by those who lost their homes. Volunteers sorted the items in our conference room and they were gratefully received by a steady stream of fire victims who heard about it from KBBF broadcasts.

Hugo reported on the fires for Radio Bilingüe, the bilingual network with which KBBF is affiliated. KBBF’s disaster activities were reported in the local media as well as international, including a telephone interview by Edgar with the BBC in London.

In the midst of all this, our on-air fundraising campaign had been planned months before to launch on October 13th. We decided to go ahead with it, mixed in with the disaster coverage. Although we were encouraging our listeners to donate on-line, many opted to come to the station in person to give their donation as well as thank us personally for our work.

Many, many members of the KBBF family devoted uncounted hours to this project; there are far too many to mention individually, but they all deserve a hug and a huge thank you. The whole experience has given station management a lot of insight and perspective into how to run our programming. We currently have four new shows being developed and training is under way for them. Our priority now is to get these exciting new voices on the air.